Tolling Bells, Rolling Hills - Neil Sands

Almost all the music I write is for voices. The words I'm setting dictate the form of the
music, and usually the very first spark of an idea of what to write comes from the words.
When I was asked to write a string quartet about Chichester and its surroundings, I knew
there'd be no such springboard. So to take the place of the words I decided to conjure for
myself a set of vivid mental images, both visual and aural, of Chichester Cathedral and the
South Downs, and use those images as a starting point for the music.

We're in the cathedral as the clock chimes six. Evensong is on. We hear the Responses
being sung, the Precentor's intonations being answered by the unaccompanied choir. A
sung Kyrie is followed by a Lord's Prayer, both parts of the daily ritual of worship at the
cathedral that is already many centuries old. As the service comes to an end, and the
reverent hush of the congregation begins to give way, tentatively at first, to chatter,
we leave the building, and travel out into the hills that surround Chichester, in the
company of the cathedral's nesting peregrine falcons, and explore the landscape
from their aerial perspective. With them we witness the hills' many moods; now
boisterous, now eerie, now subdued, always pastoral.

But even this far off, the cathedral is always visible, like a tiny jewel on the vast
landscape, and, at the very edge of our hearing, perhaps we can still hear the bell.